Aug 23, 2012
Music
White Arrows
White Arrows’ debut full-length, Dry Land Is Not a Myth, takes cues from both dance floors and drum circles. Aided by RAC’s production (Penguin Prison), the Los Angeles-based five-piece’s rock palette is all about shifting filters of psychedelic sounds. The quintet hits pop and calypso flavors along the way, finding itself slotted alongside Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective.
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Aug 22, 2012
Music
Six Organs of Admittance
Ben Chasny vehicle Six Organs of Admittance has been tagged “new folk,” and the acoustic elements, gentle drones, and low-key vocals of 2011’s Asleep on the Floodplain amply supported that description. Those anticipating the release of Ascent based on Chasny’s approach with Floodplain, depending on their tastes, may come to see his last album as jarring misdirection or the new one as a wickedly welcome change of pace.
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Drawn & Quarterly
Anouk Ricard
Aug 22, 2012
Comic Books
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Anna & Froga: Want a Gumball? is so damned delightful that a review can hardly do it justice. It’s perfect for kids, but the cartooning chops and clever humor should please anybody. Anybody.
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Aug 22, 2012
Video Games
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This is the stark and violently beautiful tone struck time and again during Vigil Games and THQ’s Darksiders II. The fall’s first major sequel finally ends the gaming drought that gamers experience every summer.
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Aug 22, 2012
Music
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That Sex Pistols reunion a few years back must have whetted John Lydon’s appetite for some reformation benefits. Lucky for him, he’s got another band he can reunite with: Public Image Ltd-even if he’s not using any of the original members.
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Aug 21, 2012
Music
Bloc Party
The band that gave us the golden post-alterna gems Silent Alarm (2005) and A Weekend in the City (2007) returns after four years with their fourth album casually named Four, and if the title seems like easy street, its 12 tracks follow suit with the nonchalance. Opener “So He Begins to Lie” kicks off with a false start in one of those recording bloopers bands often save for personality interims, and the album is never able to build its momentum as it gets jostled between a fight over noise rock and soft sleeper cells.
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Aug 20, 2012
Music
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Now that Ween has officially (finally?) ceded the throne of comedy rock, maybe it’s time we give Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, better known as Ariel Pink, his rightful crown. Back in the early aughts, with the brothers Ween already selling out huge shows, Ariel Pink was crafting the lo-est of lo-fi pop experiments, each of them revealing both an encyclopedic knowledge of music and songcraft-with a particular fetish for ‘70s and’80s radio hits-and an off-kilter sense of humor on par with that of Ween, Zappa, et al, or his own oft-cited influence, R. Stevie Moore.
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Aug 17, 2012
Music
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Yeasayer’s third and arguably best LP Fragrant World kicks off with “Fingers Never Bleed.” The diatribe on the money-mongering and unrepentant greed fueled by manipulating numbers and bilking proletariats out of their pensions by hedge fund managers and Wall Street mavens sets the tone for the rest of this magnificent record.
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Aug 16, 2012
Music
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On Yellow & Green, the Savannah, Georgia rock unit’s sound continues to evolve in a similar fashion as their two previous color-themed albums.
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Aug 16, 2012
Music
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The sophomore album from Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi is a playful record full of pop textures, light nostalgia, and occasionally cartoon-ish dynamics that does a great job undermining many of the tropes of contemporary dance music.
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